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Der Londoner Chefkoch Calum Franklin hat ein traditionelles englisches Gericht erfolgreich wiederaufleben lassen. Von LORRAINE MALLINDER

Calum Franklin’s keema-spiced cottage pie

Calum Franklin calls himself a “pastry deviant”. Talk to the London chef for a few minutes and it becomes clear that his type of iconoclasm is not so much about breaking the rules as perfecting them to the point of obsession.

This he has done with pie: pork pie, cod pie, beef Wellington pie... Should you ever be lucky enough to visit The Pie Room, Franklin’s eccentric Victorian kitchen nestling within the Holborn Dining Room, you will enjoy the very best in pies.

His recipe for success is a no-nonsense combination of hard work and focus. This city boy started out the traditional way, cleaning pots and pans. He was 17, fresh out of school and immediately knew this was the life for him.

There was something about it, he says. “I remember going home and telling my brothers: ‘This is what I want to do.’” And Franklin never looked back.

He rediscovered the art of pie making after finding some antique pie moulds in a basement store in the building that houses the Holborn Dining Room, where he works as head chef.

“I realized I didn’t know how to use them, that there was a big gap in our knowledge of traditional techniques,” he says. “Then I thought: ‘First, I’m going to teach myself, then I’ll train the team.’”

From then on, it was pie all the way. He learned tricks, such as storing the chopping board in the freezer — to keep the dough firm while rolling it. Making pastry requires discipline, he says. “It’s not as if you can add salt or lemon later.”

Before very long, the pies had outgrown the kitchen. Franklin and his team began work on the ultimate pie-in-thesky project: a special Victorian kitchen with copper and brass utensils, selling hundreds of pies every day through a hole in the wall — a window on to British culinary history.

Franklin has given new life to a style of cooking that, it seems, was slowly dying out, for London’s pie and mash shops (see page 29) are not as popular as they once were. “Pie has been part of our food culture for 600 or 700 years,” he says. “It’s gone in and out of fashion, moving between royal banquets and the tables of the simplest peasants. I wanted to make it revered again.”

Why not try making Franklin’s keema-spiced cottage pie?